Google+ Update Connects Address Book Data, Friend Circles

Google announces a new feature that associates your personal contacts with pages in its Google+ social network.

Apparently, the ongoing privacy concerns surrounding Google's new unified data strategy will not deter the company from aggressively moving forward with features that merge your personal data to increase its reach and impact. The Google+ team has announced a new feature that will now display data from your personal contacts on the associated pages of people in your circles.

"Many of you, like me, use Google Contacts to manage your personal address book (contacts.google.com). If that's the case, then starting today we'll include this contact info on your friends' Google+ profiles - for your eyes only, of course," said Google product manager Sean Purcell.

For those unfamiliar with the contacts.google.com portion of their Google account, this new update, and the information it already reveals to the account holder, may come as a bit of a surprise. When you access your contacts page, you can view all of your email contacts and see which ones are automatically tagged as most frequently contacted, as well as those you've added to your Google+ circles. For those more familiar with Google's contacts feature, the new update will now allow you to see any address, phone, email, birthday information or other notes you may have added to a particular contact on associated pages in your Google+ circles.

The changes will likely be greeted in different ways depending on your relationship to Google's new unified suite of services. For the fans of Google+, this update makes complete sense and brings a new power and efficiency to the growing social network component of Google. Boasting one of the most popular free email services on the planet with an estimated 350 million users, the matching of your Gmail data and personal contacts with your Google+ information suddenly makes the social network a lot more useful.

However, for those still a bit wary of Google's unified data strategy, the cross-pollinization of personal contacts information with Google+ pages may cause some concern. Clearly Google understands such concerns, because next to the "Details from Google Contacts" section that appears on the Circles on which you have contact information, you'll see a "visible only to you" message. But even with the added assurance of that "for your eyes only" indicator, for many this new automatic information display in Google+ will likely serve as another reminder of how careful users need to be with discrete information on free Internet services.

Those still new to the company's contacts feature, and the impact it may have on their Google+ experience, can visit a detailed information page dedicated to clarifying how contacts work within the Google data ecosystem.